Makes the marketing team more reactive and agile with constant monitoring meaning problems are identified quickly

Retention rate up 100% since pipeline implementation

For small businesses, an all-in-one solution that can handle all their workflow processes including customer relationship management (CRM), file sharing, time management, and even website building makes life simpler, especially if it's free. Collaboration platform Bitrix24 offers exactly that service, targeting small and medium businesses with a product that covers a broad range of needs.

"Our challenge is to gain a deep understanding of both current and potential users in order to spend our advertising budgets in a targeted way. We want to attract users that will stay with the platform whilst keeping the spend-per-user low, using segmentation to target users by demographic or cohort."

—Dmitry Kudryavsky, Head of Digital Marketing, Bitrix24

"We have 4 million registered users worldwide," explains Dmitry Kudryavsky, Head of Digital Marketing for Bitrix24. "The user base is very diverse and ranges from small governmental structures to small car repair shops and hairdressers, IT companies, medical services, and so on. For teams of up to 12 people, the software is free, and we have an Enterprise edition for larger companies. All the product development takes place here at our headquarters in Russia, but since expanding internationally around seven years ago, we have users across the globe."

Dmitry is responsible for marketing in Russia and across other Russian-speaking territories including Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Bitrix24 is one of the leading software platforms in its sector within Russia and has high brand penetration. "As the product is so well known here, we need to come up with increasingly targeted advertising to make sure we're reaching the right people, who will not only sign up for the product, but continue to use it," he explains.

To do that, the Bitrix24 marketing team uses marketing reports to deliver insights into the success of their campaigns, but generating these reports was a long and labor-intensive process. To speed up the process and gain more useful feedback on their campaigns, they worked with partner OWOX to implement an automated report delivery pipeline using the OWOX BI Pipeline and BigQuery on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

"Our challenge is to gain a deep understanding of both current and potential users in order to spend our advertising budgets in a targeted way," says Dmitry. "We want to attract users that will stay with the platform whilst keeping the spend-per-user low, using segmentation to target users by demographic or cohort."

"My team has been working with Google products for a long time, and the Google Cloud Platform interface felt intuitive and simple to use. As we were already using Google Analytics, it didn't require a big engineering effort to restructure the data and start sending it to BigQuery instead."

—Dmitry Kudryavsky, Head of Digital Marketing, Bitrix24

Automating marketing report generation

The faster you can see whether or not a marketing campaign is working, the quicker you can adjust it and make sure you're not spending money for nothing. Previously, the team responsible for marketing Bitrix24 generated its reports manually. "It was somebody's job to compile data, so the process was slow and error-prone," says Dmitry. "We wanted to automate and reduce the operational burden. The volume of data had grown very large, so it was difficult to aggregate those volumes into a single report with Google Analytics, and we needed deeper and more nuanced insights that could be produced quickly without relying on data sampling and losing accuracy."

To do that, OWOX implemented its OWOX BI Pipeline feeding data into BigQuery to enable constant monitoring of the system and produce regular automated reports. "We were looking for a fully managed solution that entirely frees us from any system administration," Dmitry explains. "My team has been working with Google products for a long time, and the Google Cloud Platform interface felt intuitive and simple to use. As we were already using Google Analytics, it didn't require a big engineering effort to restructure the data and start sending it to BigQuery instead."

"The data is collected from various sources such as the CRM system as well as advertising and mail-out services," explains Margo Kashuba, Chief Marketing Officer at OWOX BI. "We collate and structure the data by cohort, and then write queries scripts using BigQuery. Reports are then visualized in Sheets, Smart Data, or Google Data Studio. The data collated in BigQuery from multiple sources enables the Bitrix24 team to analyze users by cohort, depending on when or how they registered for the software, for example."

Offering immediate marketing feedback

Being able to observe the results of a campaign immediately can help minimize spending on campaigns that aren't working. The Bitrix24 marketing team works with a number of key metrics to measure the performance of its campaigns, including the volume of registration, the cost-per-lead, retention after two days and seven days, as well as a range of other metrics available through BigQuery.

"As the marketing reports take five minutes to produce, we can monitor the situation closely and quickly correct a campaign that isn't working. Our retention rate has grown by 100 percent since we started using the OWOX BI Pipeline with BigQuery, and that's because our monitoring is so much faster."

—Dmitry Kudryavsky, Head of Digital Marketing, Bitrix24

"Using BigQuery, every month we process data from around 1.5 million unique users who have opted in when downloading the software," says Dmitry. "We then work with OWOX BI to produce reports regularly on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis to give us insight into how our customers are behaving within the Bitrix24 software, and based on the reports we receive we can build segments for our mailing lists."

"For example, we launched a campaign promoting the telephony service that is part of the Bitrix24 suite of services," Dmitry explains. "We received a large number of registrations resulting from that campaign, and the cost-per-user was very low. However, by monitoring the behavior of those users after two days and after a week, we were able to see that the retention also was very low. They were interested only in that specific service, and the product as a whole did not fit their needs. As a result, we were quickly able to decide that it wasn't worth spending money on similar campaigns promoting that service. The lesson is that we can spend less and earn more by allocating our budget correctly."

Enabling more targeted campaigns

Implementing the new automated data pipeline has made day-to-day life easier for the Bitrix24 marketing team. "As the data collection and report production is now automated, it's much quicker and easier, and eliminates the need for low-level work such as copying and pasting data," says Dmitry. "That enables us to focus on the insights and optimizing our marketing campaigns."

Faster reporting has also helped to improve the team's performance. "As the marketing reports take five minutes to produce, we can monitor the situation closely and quickly correct a campaign that isn't working," Dmitry explains. "Our retention rate has grown by 100 percent since we started using the OWOX BI Pipeline with BigQuery, and that's because our monitoring is so much faster."

Now the Bitrix24 marketing team is extending its collaboration with OWOX BI to expand the number of reports generated, grow the volumes of data processed, and implement additional metrics for even more data insights.

"We have a detailed roadmap for the evolution of our automatic monitoring with the support of GCP and OWOX BI," says Dmitry. "That means our marketing can be even more targeted with individualized messaging that really makes the most of our budget."

About Bitrix24

Bitrix24 is a free all-in-one business collaboration platform that includes CRM, file-sharing, and time-management solutions.